


What is Done Cannot be Undone

by RetroactiveCon



Series: Praying That It'll Be You [4]
Category: The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Past Hartley Rathaway/Eobard Thawne | Harrison Wells
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-06
Updated: 2019-12-06
Packaged: 2021-02-26 02:21:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,591
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21685957
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RetroactiveCon/pseuds/RetroactiveCon
Summary: "Your precious little Barry Allen is fretting over the choice you gave him—stop you in the present or stop you in the past.”“If it was as simple as killing me, don’t you think he would have done that already?” Thawne pushes away from the glass and leans back against the far wall of the cell. “He craves my death as much as you.”Hartley remembers hearing Barry’s ragged, broken voice through the computer: “I wanna kill you right now.” Knowing that this man, this monster, could provoke such genuine rage from the sweet boy who would exhaust himself to protect his enemies only makes Hartley loathe him more.
Series: Praying That It'll Be You [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1562548
Comments: 7
Kudos: 110





	What is Done Cannot be Undone

While the others cluster in the Cortex, debating the wisdom of sending Barry to the past to undo Thawne’s most vicious deed, Hartley collects his gauntlets and braves the Pipeline. 

Thawne, still wearing the face of the deceased Harrison Wells, looks thoroughly unsurprised to see Hartley waiting for him. “I wondered when you would come,” he says. “Cisco and Barry have already been to see me. For whatever it’s worth, I’d predicted you would come sooner.” 

“Here I am.” Hartley spreads his arms. “The last of your pets. That’s all we were to you, wasn’t it, Thawne? Amusement?”

Thawne draws in a breath through his teeth. “Oh,” he says, drawing it out as though he’s sampled something particularly exquisite. “You have no idea how long I’ve waited to hear my true name on your lips.”

Hartley scoffs. “I have an inkling. I was your favorite toy for a long time, but that’s all I was—a toy. A means to bring about the birth of your wonderful _Flash.”_ He spits the title as though it’s poison, the way he had when he was first caught. Since finding out the Flash’s identity as sweet little Barry Allen, his feelings are somewhat less clear, but Thawne needn’t know that. 

“Give yourself more credit.” Thawne presses a hand to the glass. “You know, in my future, the name Hartley Rathaway was spoken with admiration. You were a brilliant mind from a primitive time. I sought you out knowing that you would be my equal in a way few others were.” 

Hartley fights down the urge to scream at him, to recoil from the glass and run. It isn’t the words that steal his composure; it’s the honesty in Thawne’s eyes. He means every word. 

“And, yes, I’ll admit you were a pleasant diversion when my circumstances grew oppressive.” Thawne gives Hartley a leisurely glance. “But it was your mind that captivated me, Hartley—your mind that stopped me from killing you when you threatened the future of my accelerator.” 

“Are you expecting a ‘thank you’?” Hartley asks, his voice sharp-edged like the shattered glass he’d once scattered across Thawne’s floor. “After what you did to me, you expect me to thank you for sparing my life?” 

Thawne tilts his head, studying Hartley as he might an interesting microbe in a lab. “Would you have preferred death?” 

Hartley doesn’t dignify him with an answer. Instead, he paces to the wiring that feeds into the antiproton cavities. “You know,” he says, his tone falsely light, “they’ve left me unsupervised since your great reveal. I’ve had unrestricted access to STAR Labs data—personnel files, health files, scans. I saw that you took the precaution of password-protecting yours, but you admired my mind for a reason.”

He can picture Thawne’s expression from the tone of his voice—the same slightly surprised, mildly impressed tone he had taken on whenever Hartley made an unusual move in a game of chess. “You identified my frequency.” 

Hartley nods. A final twist of his fingers and the circuitry of his sonic gauntlets is patched into the sound system of the Pipeline. 

“You won’t do it.” Thawne sounds absolutely certain. “You’ve had multiple opportunities to kill me. Each time, you failed.” 

“Each time, I was playing a different game.” Hartley turns to face him, one thumb resting lightly on the switch to activate his gauntlets. From the moment the frequency first sounds, he has seconds before Team Flash arrive to stop him. He can turn his gauntlets on them without doing them serious harm—the frequency will disorient them and cause temporary hearing loss, but they’ll recover. That doesn’t mean he wants to. “Now, there’s no other game for me to play. Your precious little Barry Allen is fretting over the choice you gave him—stop you in the present or stop you in the past.”

“If it was as simple as killing me, don’t you think he would have done that already?” Thawne pushes away from the glass and leans back against the far wall of the cell. “He craves my death as much as you.”

Hartley remembers hearing Barry’s ragged, broken voice through the computer: “I wanna kill you right now.” Knowing that this man, this monster, could provoke such genuine rage from the sweet boy who would exhaust himself to protect his enemies only makes Hartley loathe him more. “I know,” he says. “And I know that if you can’t get back to your own time, you would settle for making the Flash into a killer.”

“How noble of you, Mr. Rathaway.” Thawne smirks. “Selling your own soul to save Barry Allen’s. I knew a boy like that once, and look what he’s become.” He gestures at his own chest. 

“There’s nothing noble about it.” Hartley flicks the switch. “I want you dead for what you did to me.” 

The frequency that emanates from the Pipeline’s speakers sends Thawne to his knees. It sounds to Hartley like a high-pitched shriek of metal on metal—inescapable, painful, but not deadly. He shakes off his discomfort to watch Thawne crumple to the floor, his hands scrabbling for purchase, for escape. 

“Hartley!” As he’d predicted, it’s Barry. He has one hand against his head; the other is braced on the wall for support. His frequency is close to Thawne’s—an effect of the Speed Force, no doubt. He won’t die, but he must be in pain. If he had an iota of self-preservation, he would turn around and run as fast as he can in the other direction. “Don’t do this!”

Hartley takes a deep, steadying breath. Then, as he’d planned, he steps aside. “If you want to save him, Flash, I won’t stop you. It’s your choice.” 

Barry staggers up the ramp and takes the sonic gauntlets in his hands. The switch to turn them off is lit in bright, LED green—there’s no mistaking how to silence the frequency that’s tearing Thawne apart. Barry’s hands shake and he drops the gauntlets as though they’ve burned him. That’s his choice, then. Hartley turns back to Thawne and pretends he didn’t see. 

_“Factum fieri infectum non potest,”_ he rasps, nodding at Barry. 

Hartley wishes he could leap through the glass, wrap his hands around Thawne’s neck, and squeeze. Instead, he kneels down, presses a hand to the glass, and spits, _“Faber est suae quisque fortunae.”_

Down the hall, the elevator bell chimes. Thawne turns his gaze in the direction of the doorway, then fixes his eyes on Barry. 

“I made you,” he says. There’s no venom in his voice; he’s resigned to his fate. “You can run as fast and as far as you want, Barry Allen, but you will never outrun me.”

The clatter of footsteps in the hall grows louder. Cisco, Joe, Iris, and Caitlin round the corner in a jumble just as Thawne’s rattling breathing ceases. 

“What did you do?” Cisco shouts. 

Hartley watches blood dribble from Thawne’s ears, nose, lips, and eyes. (Those mesmerizing, beautiful, terrible eyes will haunt him until he dies. Thawne’s legacy to him, stolen from a dead man.) “You should have killed me,” he whispers to Thawne’s corpse. 

He pushes past Barry, who’s watched Thawne’s death numbly, and flicks off his gauntlets. The ensuing silence presses on his damaged eardrums more than Thawne’s frequency. It’s broken by a flood of reprimands. “You killed him _while we were making a plan?”_ overlaps “How dare you go behind our backs” and all but drowns out Joe’s muttered “You can take the meta outta the Pipeline…”

“I’ve told you from the start,” Hartley spits. “I wanted him to suffer.” 

It’s Iris who notices Barry standing in front of the glass. She approaches with one hand held out, offering comfort or trying to protect herself. “Barry?”

“Iris.” He turns around and stares uncomprehendingly at her. “Iris, I…”

There’s a space between heartbeats where his eyes slip out of focus and his jaw slackens. Iris, Joe, and Cisco lunge forward. It’s Joe who catches him when his legs go out from under him. “Easy there, Barr,” he murmurs. “I gotcha. I gotcha.” 

Joe, Iris, and Caitlin rush Barry to the medbay. Cisco lingers, blocking Hartley’s path to the door. He stands no chance in a physical fight—he’s clever, not scrappy—but he holds himself as though he thinks he’d win. “I don’t say this lightly, but what the actual fuck, Piper?” 

Hartley shifts his gauntlets from one hand to the other. There’s a knot in his stomach that he’d hoped would dissipate with Thawne’s death. It reveals itself in the tightness of his voice. “I don’t owe you an explanation. He needed to die, and I was the only one willing to do it.” 

“That should’ve been Barry’s choice!” Cisco snaps. 

Hartley scoffs. “Thawne needed Barry to open the wormhole, but Barry doesn’t need Thawne to go to the past. Now that we know how, if he wishes, he can go without having to worry about what Thawne might do.”

Cisco shifts his weight. He wants to shove Hartley, pin him or punch him; it’s clear from the look in his eyes. “You know Barry. He won’t go. With Thawne here, he might’ve been motivated, but now—he won’t go.” 

When they return to the medbay, they discover that even if Barry wanted to go, he shouldn’t. “He’s severely malnourished,” Caitlin tells them in an undertone. “I don’t think he’s been eating since he found out Wells was Thawne. Your frequency didn’t help.” This is said, with a hint of a glower, to Hartley. “How long was he exposed?” 

Hartley shrugs. He hadn’t been timing it. “A few minutes.”

On the cot, Barry groans and struggles to sit up. Joe lays a hand on his chest to keep him still. “What happened?”

“You collapsed, Barr. Malnourishment, Caitlin says.” Joe throws a glance at Hartley that stops just shy of open hostility. He, like Caitlin, blames some part of Barry’s collapse on Hartley’s frequency. “How long has it been since you ate?” 

Barry rubs a hand over his face. “I don’t know,” he admits. “I’ve just been so worried about catching Wells—Thawne—that I…I kinda…forgot?” 

While the others are preoccupied with Barry, Hartley slips away.

***

Two days later, Barry travels to the past. He returns shaken but resolute, and upon being questioned, confesses that he hadn’t tried to save his mother.

“I don’t want to give up the family I have now,” he admits. “It was just…I wanted to say goodbye, and to reassure her that my dad and I are okay.” He gives a watery laugh and swipes at his eyes. “I’m pathetic.” 

“No, Barry.” Iris takes his hand. “What you did was very brave. You could have had her back, but you chose to let her go.”

Barry huddles close to her shoulder. “Thawne still took her from me,” he whispers, “but now it feels like I had a say.”

They decide thereupon to call it an early night. Hartley lingers. He ought to pretend to leave and circle back around, as he’s done for weeks now, but he’s loath to leave Barry. 

“Uh.” Barry glances back at Hartley, who’s pretending to inspect the Flash suit. “You guys go ahead, I’ll catch up.”

Only once the room is empty—even Caitlin has ceased to linger now that Ronnie has come home—does Barry cross to Hartley’s side. “Hey,” he offers. “Uh, are you okay?”

“I should be asking that of you.” Hartley skims a finger over the Flash’s gleaming insignia. Once he had loathed it with a passion second only to the hatred he felt for Harrison Wells. Now his world has been upended: the hero he’d despised was manipulated by the same man who destroyed his life, and that man, Eobard Thawne, lied about his identity for years. “What Thawne did to you—you would have been within your rights to tear him apart.” 

Barry offers him a crooked smile. “I pretty much did. I could have stopped you, but…I didn’t want to.” 

Hartley crosses his arms protectively across his chest. “I thought that when I killed him, I would feel free. Like all the things he’s done to me would hurt less once I took revenge.”

“Yeah.” Barry’s voice wavers. He doesn’t quite make it to the end of “I thought so too” before he lets out a hastily-stifled sob. “Sorry, sorry…”

Impulsively, Hartley wraps an arm around Barry’s shaking shoulders. “You can cry,” he says. It feels strange to be giving him permission, but he gets the sense that without it, Barry would stifle his emotions until they consumed him from the inside out. 

It must be the right thing to say. As soon as Hartley is finished speaking, Barry sobs, deep heart-wrenching gasps that tear through him with the ferocity of a sonic attack. Hartley fears that if he lets go, Barry will crumble to pieces. 

“He killed her,” he sobs. “He killed her just to hurt me, and then he needed me anyway, and why would he do that? What did I do to him? What did I do to make him hate me so much?” 

Hartley keeps his peace. Weeks ago, while he was still locked in the Pipeline, he’d thought to himself that one day someone would break Barry apart for no other reason than to watch him hurt, and that in the aftermath, Barry wouldn’t allow himself to hate them. He’d try to understand, because that’s integral to his character, and he would fall short because he lacks the capacity to understand the depths of human evil. In no way had that thought prepared him for the reality of listening to Barry’s heartbroken pleading. 

“All that time—he was just playing with me, he was using me…” Barry mops at his face with his shirtsleeve. “Everything I’ve done, everything I am, is because of him, and he was just _using me…”_

“I don’t believe that.” Hartley surprises even himself with the conviction in his voice. Barry glances up at him, tentative hope in his eyes. Faced with that trembling hope, Hartley has to continue. “I’ve heard Cisco talk about you—how from the moment you got your powers, your only thought was to help people. Thawne played no part in that. He wanted to study you, to put you in a lab and train you like some caged creature until you were fast enough—am I right?”

Barry nods. His eyes are riveted on Hartley’s face as though he’s in a trance. The right word could shatter him beyond repair, and Hartley, who has never in his life felt the need to be gentle, chooses every word with care. 

“Thawne may have made you a speedster, but you made yourself the Flash. Never believe that you owe the good in you to him, because you don’t, any more than I owe the darkness in me to what he did.”

Barry curls into his arms and breathes, “Thank you.” Hartley fights the urge to recoil. He can’t remember the last time someone curled into him for comfort. Hesitantly, he wraps stiff arms around Barry’s shoulders and rocks him back and forth. 

“You can cry,” he offers again, for lack of anything else to say. 

Barry sniffles his way into silence. Hartley has shifted his weight so that he can bolt away the moment Barry withdraws when he hears a whispered, “I loved him.”

Hartley nods his understanding against Barry’s prickly-soft hair and admits, “I did too.”

**Author's Note:**

> According to Google, the translations for those Latin phrases are:
> 
> Factum fieri infectum non potest: It is impossible for a deed to be undone (basically, Thawne saying "He's letting me die and he'll have to live with it")
> 
> Faber est suae quisque fortunae: Every man is the artisan of his own fortune


End file.
